I do – No You do – Who Really Owns Data?

In your organization let’s assume you are a knowledge worker. Are you responsible for the quality of content that you create, or is your IT department? It seems that this is a big issue in companies. In fact, it’s the biggest issue in solving information governance initiatives. The biggest complaint of users is the inability to access quality information. From an IT point of view they are more concerned with content duplication and migration as a way to improve the quality of information.  Which leads us back to the initial question of who is accountable for information quality?

In a SAP survey, conducted by Forbes, the results indicated that 79% of the IT managers said data quality was the responsibility of IT, yet 74% of the finance, sales, and marketing respondents said it was their own job to assure data quality. “It’s not surprising that both IT and all line-of-business respondents agreed that the number one roadblock to establishing an enterprise information management program is the fragmentation of data ownership. But each group was looking at the other as responsible for the roadblock.”

Although our technologies essentially remove the responsibility from the end users and IT, collaboration and internal communications is key in managing unstructured content and setting up the enterprise taxonomies. Organizations still need to overcome variances in language between departments as well as across global boundaries and update the taxonomies as business changes. Interestingly, our conceptTaxonomyManager was designed for the knowledge expert and not IT.

Who owns your content?